Apathy for the Devil: A 1970s Memoir by Nick Kent: review

Tom Horan gets down with Apathy for the Devil by music critic Nick Kent, which
recalls the often desolate world of Seventies rock

By Tom Horan

6:15AM GMT 20 Feb 2010

Among the platitudes of the rock‘n’roll era, “never trust a junkie” is right up there with “never trust a hippie”. The former NME writer Nick Kent is probably as well known for his heroin addiction as his journalism, so it’s hard to know how much to believe of his reminiscences of the Seventies music industry. He was, as he describes here in excruciating detail, on drugs for almost the entire decade. But then, in the brutal and often desolate world he documents, so was everyone else.

The son of a one-time sound engineer at Abbey Road studios, Kent first wrote about music for the magazines of London’s motley underground scene in 1972. He admired Americans like Jack Kerouac and Hunter Thompson and set out not simply to tell the stories of the rock stars he met but also to live the way they did – to excess. As much as his enthusiasm for bands like Led Zeppelin and the Rolling Stones, his flamboyantly effeminate dress sense soon marked him out. As he says of his first published work: “The writing itself wasn’t particularly outstanding but it had an engagingly naïve and energetic tone… at least you could tell I was keen about what I was addressing.”

Forty years on, this analysis applies to much of Apathy for the Devil. A kind reading of his prose style would be to say that it perfectly suggests the era that it is describing. The spirit of Harry Enfield and Paul Whitehouse’s spoof DJs Smashie and Nicey pervades its pages. Bands are always “combos”; songs are not written, they’re “penned”; nothing begins, it “commences”; almost everything is “ongoing”. But as Kent is astute enough to realise, “rock writing best came to life when the writer was right in the thick of the action. The range of characters was phenomenally rich.”

Allied to a simple year-per-chapter chronological structure, this is what drives the book forward and drags from a stew of clichés a fascinating read. Kent was at his most influential in an era when stars allowed favoured journalists not just an hour in some antiseptic hotel room for an interview but days and weeks of “hanging out”. Keith Richards, Iggy Pop, David Bowie, the MC5 – Kent is there with them backstage, on the private jet, sealed in the hotel bathroom, generally in a fug of groupies and narcotics.

So much, so well trodden: it’s hardly a revelation that drugs dominated Seventies music, although Kent’s anecdotes are good value, not least the story of Led Zep’s notorious – and notoriously fat – manager Peter Grant collapsing into a sofa at an Elvis Presley afterparty and accidentally sitting on Elvis’s father. But as recent memoirs by Patti Smith and Edmund White have shown, what makes the decade compelling is the revolution that occurred between the bloated early years and the transformative arrival of punk. Kent’s career arc perfectly straddles the period, rising as the Sixties end and collapsing as the Eighties beckon, forming a perfect counterpoint to what is happening in pop culture.

And he didn’t just meet the most important band of the Seventies – he was in it. As Malcolm McLaren put together the Sex Pistols he briefly invited Kent to play guitar, before McLaren’s ruthless and manipulative behaviour saw Kent spitting and railing against the “King’s Road fashion ponce”. Kent was soon ostracised by the punk scene he had done much to support, to the point that he was beaten, stabbed and at one point whipped with a bike chain by Sid Vicious.

It’s here – as when a McLaren associate blinds a young girl at a gig – that Kent reveals a side to punk that has been given a gloss of glamour down the years: the mindless violence that surrounded it. Perhaps it was Kent’s clothes that made people hit him. “I may hold the Seventies record for being called a poof the most times in public by complete strangers,” he reports at one point. Maybe the extent of his addiction just made him irritating: his life by this stage was “like taking up residence inside a Hieronymous Bosch painting”. What’s plain by the end, as Kent finally takes on the addiction that is killing him, is that “the spivs had trounced the fops”. And a new breed was about to trounce them in turn, worse than both put together – “the yuppies”.